Effective Search Engine Marketing - Part 1
By Rod Jacka
Unless you have spent the last 2 years hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard that search engine marketing is crucial to effectively market your business on the web.
Search marketing is big business and the model can really work. Your potential customers enter a search term and a relevant advertisement is shown or a website is listed in the search results. They quickly see the relevance and value and then click on the link to visit the website. Everyone wins; the customer, the search engine and you.
OK, enough of the hype, the reality is that search is great, but you need to work at it. It is quite easy to bring hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website; you can simply purchase ads and write enticing copy and people start clicking to your site. It is an entirely different matter to convert these visitors into customers.
One customer came to us last year having spent over $20,000 in search engine advertising without realising a single lead. Their site attracted lots of “traffic” but no sales. So what went wrong? In a nutshell, poor targeting, lack of testing and measurement and finally a poor offer.
Search engine marketing is relatively new, but it follows the classic rules of marketing. Namely AIDA:
- Attention – making sure that your product, service or message gets noticed (i.e. a high ranking page or advertisement in a search engine)
- Interest – A combination of getting the click through to your site and maintaining that interest once the visitor has arrived at your site.
- Desire – Generating a real feeling of need or want in the visitor where they understand that your product or service is absolutely what they need.
- Action – Spurring the visitor on so that they become your customer.
Unfortunately a large number of would be marketers and so called search engine marketing professionals limit themselves to just the Attention element. All their energy goes into getting visitors to the site by displaying the site in the search results. Too often the only performance indicator used to evaluate the results of these campaigns is how high the site ranks or how many people visit the site. When challenged I am sure that the words “brand building” would be used to justify this expenditure.
This is like purchasing the best retail position in a large shopping mall or on the top end of the high street shopping strip, but paying no attention to how long people visit your shop or whether they even purchase at all. This is obviously a very short term strategy.
In my opinion the primary benchmark for any campaign is the number of sales or actions that it generates. Obviously, achieving high search engine rankings is the start of the process, after all if you are not seen at all then your site won’t be visited, but they are merely the means to generate “attention”.
The key to “effective” search marketing is to locate the keywords that generate the most sales or other outcomes on your website and focus on these. These keywords form your most important assets, in effect your “A list”. Once developed this list is crucial to your future business success and needs to be monitored, guarded and measured constantly to maintain your position. Other keywords will come along and these must be evaluated in turn. Some will make to the A list and others will go on the B or C lists.
So how do you identify which keywords make the “A list”? By testing of course. There are a large number of quality tools on the market with which you can do this (or naturally you can always engage our services). I strongly recommend ClickTracks or Google Analytics as tools that can assist you identify the keywords that generate “action”.
I will examine how you can use search engine marketing to increase both visitors and sales in the next article, but for now the message is look beyond “attention” and start looking to “action”.
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